Time In A Box (tf)

Families are interesting enough without visual aids. When pictures are dug up from assorted basements, all kinds of secrets and long-lost gibberish and high crimes and misdemeanors are laid out on the family room floor. And pretty soon you become completely aware of why you are like you are. You learned to be a ghost wandering hallways, trying not to wake anybody while searching for ice for your glass and bottle openers for your bottles. You have no plans to toss yourself through somebody else’s window. Just lay low, don’t get arrested, and for God’s sake find the right room when the time comes and the sun starts to rise. You don’t want to be trapped out in the open with a room key you don’t know how to use. You’ll be flogged mercilessly for your indiscretions before breakfast, and the camera will arrive to make sure they get the bloody shots of you being kicked while you’re down and howling for somebody to come save you. But nobody ever does. Family disintegration is not a team sport. At least not for you. Those vicious kicks to the spleen and to the back of the head are supposed to make you stronger. They are always aimed at getting you back into the tent. Never outside it. Family is like politics that way. Better to have someone inside the tent pissing out than to have someone outside the tent pissing in. LBJ said that, and he know what he was talking about. Here was the man who said of an opponent, “we should say he has carnal relations with his sows.” An aide was mortified…”you want to call him a pigfu$&er? You can’t do that. It’s not true.” “Of course it’s not true”, says LBJ. “But let’s make the bastard deny it.”

Yes, in his own way LBJ was even meaner than Nixon, and if it wasn’t for what Johnson called “that bitch of a war” he may have become one of the great Presidents of all time. The first, surely, to take poverty head on and damn the torpedoes. Johnson wanted it all. He wanted guns and butter but the Pentagon considered butter un-loyal and communistic while in the midst of carpet bombing Laos and Cambodia with enough napalm to fossilize thousands. General LeMay had small use for butter. He ate steak every day at the White House cafeteria, and if he touched butter at all if was to start food fights between the Air Force and the Marines…..which he always won because he outranked everybody and had a reputation for wanting to solve even minor arguments with nuclear bombs.

So Johnson saw the light and scampered away like a bunny on the lawn, leaving Nixon only to wait for yet another Kennedy to get his head blown off. Madness and fear was in the air, and soon Bobby was out of the race due to some mixed up Arab with good aim and Rosy Grier and his pathetic reflexes. Nixon now had clear sailing to the oval office, and the time to focus on 2 things. One was foreign policy, which he adored because it got him out of a White House rimmed with buses to stop anti-war freaks from ripping out his appendix. His other fixation was his “enemies list”….which included anybody who disagreed with him, especially if they happened to be Jewish or a former member of the Beatles. Domestic policy to Nixon was beneath contempt. “Building outhouses in Peoria” is what he called it, and he left it totally up to one of his aides who would soon spend time in prison for high crimes and misdemeanors. Watergate and all that.

Nixon get on the helicopter and flashed that V sign like some sort of demented wildebeest and knew Ford, who was as dumb as a 12 pound bag of fertilizer, would pardon him. Ford did, thereby pissing away any chance at a 2nd term for himself. He was beaten like a scalded dog by a Peanut Farmer from Georgia who had the misfortune of being a decent man. The White House turned Carter into sniveling wreck of a man, barely able to put a 2 coherent sentences together without covering himself in an awful sweater. Iranian militants took US embassy personnel hostage and Carter acted like somebody frozen in ice for future experiments. His one “rescue” attempt was a world-class disaster, and 1980 saw him repeatedly kicked in the temple by a 3rd rate actor who would soon go senile, but not before taking whatever was left of the US middle class and turning it into a crazed group willing to blame just about anyone not white for the new fear.

And so it goes. Pictures. They can say 1000 words.

We’re in a heap of trouble boys. The fear is still upon us, and the bombs are still falling. The jobs require name-tags and sleep only comes after massive doses of the right medication. Legality seems irrelevant.